I chose nonplussed as today’s word to find out if there was a word plussed and what it might mean.

No luck there, although I might have suspected that someone would have started using plussed as a kind of backformation. Urbandictionary says that nonplussed is:

often misused as meaning unfazed, but actually means bewildered.

So if people thought nonplussed meant “unfazed” or “oblivious”, wouldn’t plussed logically mean “fazed” and “blivious”? Well, I guess not.

The reason that nonplussed means “bewildered” is that it more literally means “stopped in your tracks.” Nonplus means you can’t go forward, just like its components non and plus might suggest.

The first citation for nonplussed was in the work of a guy named William Warner in 1606—so that’s ten years before old Shakespeare was irreversibly nonplussed. Both Warner and Shakespeare lived in a time before there were copyright laws and so people often felt quite free to start printing off someone else’s book and selling it themselves. The book that nonplussed first appeared in was something called Albion’s England and it was a pirated work in its day. But just because there were no copyright laws doesn’t mean authors were without any protection. Luckily William Warner was a lawyer as well as an author and he’d actually given a written license to his printer, so that when another printer started selling his book before its official release date he had the police come down on them like a ton of Harry Potter books.

This Albion’s England was actually a long poem that supposedly described the history of England from the time of Noah’s Ark up to the then present. The fact that it was full of fiction as well as fact seemed to make no-never-mind to the people who bought it. It was clearly a good candidate for pirating since edition after edition kept on being released over a period of 26 years. With each new edition came more and more content until at the end Albion’s England actually took 16 books to contain.

That’s enough to stop anyone in their tracks